The research underpinning this controversial book simply does not support the thesis, made explicit in the title, that Pius XII was Hitler's pope, or Hitler's pawn, as John Cornwell describes him on p. 297. The author is even more condemnatory, if that is possible, later on the same page: "His grandiloquent self-exculpation in 1946 referring to his wartime role concerning the Jews revealed him to be not only an ideal Pope for the Nazis' Final Solution, but a hypocrite."
This is not, you have judged correctly, a volume written without passion, indignation or righteous anger. For example, the author expresses his conviction in the concluding sentence of the book that "the cumulative verdict of history shows him to be not a saintly exemplar for future generations, but a deeply flawed human being from whom Catholics, and our relations with other religious, can best profit by expressing our sincere regret."
The "cumulative verdict of history" is a revealing phrase. It posits that the author believes the verdict of "History" is in and that Pius XII is guilty as charged, sir. That may be. But it is injudicious to use such Rankean phraseology when files that are central to a comprehensive and balanced interpretation of the pope's wartime record, are locked away in the Holy See unseen by international scholars. The latter statement is not entirely correct. Between 1965 and 1981 the Vatican published, under the editorship of a panel of distinguished Catholic historians, eleven volumes - Actes et Documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. But that project did not satisfy the professional requirements of historians of the twentieth century and, in particular, of the Holocaust.
Nothing short of the truth will free the Vatican from the charge that there is something to hide. The only way to have an informed debate about the role of the modern papacy, and of the pontificate of Pius XII in particular, is to open wide the doors of the Vatican archives to bona fide scholars.
John Cornwell's book will not satisfy many professional historians. The early text is marred by teleological and by unhistorical phrases - the type that a supervisor in a university might find in a first draft of a promising thesis. There is a strong historical case to be made about the penetration of Catholic theology and Catholic thought by forms of radical anti-semitism. But the author is most unconvincing when he attempts to demonstrate that the young Eugenio Pacelli(later Pius XII) was predisposed to antisemitism.
This book is most interesting where the author introduces new historical evidence of great significance - the sworn depositions (amounting to a 1,000 pages of text) for the beatification of Pius XII, and access to Pacelli's files relating to his mission to Germany from 1917-1922. Cornwell also gained access to wartime letters to Mrs Bridget McEwan from the British envoy to the Holy See, Francis d'Arcy Osborne. The latter shed important additional light on the envoy's diaries, which have been used extensively by the distinguished historian, Prof. Owen Chadwick, in his outstanding Britain and the Vatican during World War Two.
No matter how badly handled and how fragmentary, the new evidence produced by John Cornwell makes for very disturbing reading in places. He has original sources to cover Pacelli's first residential mission abroad to Bavaria. Vatican documents record that he left Rome for Germany laden with special foods to tend his ever-delicate stomach. The author argues that during the revolutionary uprising in Munich Pacelli was not the hero of the hour - it was, instead, his assistant Mgr. Schioppa who faced down the revolutionaries. Reporting to the Secretary of State, Gasparri, Pacelli described Levien, the leader of the Bolshevik uprising, as a "young man, of about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly." The author describes that particular passage as "repugnant and ominous" for two reasons: it pointed to Pacelli's life-long identification of Jews with the origins and growth of Bolshevism and, also underlying the passage, was "an impression of his stereotypical anti-Semitic contempt."
There is irrefutable evidence that Pacelli was a conservative in politics and that he admired the regime of Marshal Petain and other orthodox reactionaries. But how far was he influenced in his actions as nuncio, as Secretary of State, and as Pope by a cocktail of anti-semitism and anti-bolshevism so characteristic of certain strands of Catholic thought in the early part of the twentieth century? This book would see no need for a question-mark.
Pacelli, according to the author, cynically signed a concordat with Hitler, appeased Nazis, fascists and authoritarians throughout the 1930s, and as Pope during the war kept silent when, as early as 1942, senior Vatican officials had in their possession evidence of the systematic genocide of the Jews.
John Cornwell introduces important new evidence to make his case against Pius XII. He is particularly scathing about Pius XII's disputed response when confronted by the deportation in 1943 of over 1,000 Italian Jews. On the one side, the author quotes a group of about 80 Jewish survivors from various concentration camps in Germany who told the Pope in Rome on 29 November 1945 of the "great honour at being able to thank the Holy Father personally for his generosity towards those persecuted during the Nazi-Fascist period."
On the other side of the argument, the author quotes Settimia Spizzichino, who was the only Roman Jewish woman to survive deportation and to survive Auschwitz. In a BBC interview in 1995, she said: "I came back from Auschwitz on my own. I lost my mother, two sisters, a niece, and one brother. Pius XII could have warned us about what was going to happen . . . He played right into the Germans' hands. It all happened right under his nose. But he was an anti-Semitic Pope, a pro-German Pope. He didn't take a single risk. And when they say the Pope is like Jesus Christ, it is not true. He did not save a single child. Nothing." That is swingeing criticism and there is much more of the same in this volume.
However mistaken Pius XII's wartime polices and timid his actions, it is really very wide of the mark to title this book "Hitler's Pope". That case is certainly not proven. Neither is the sub-title accurate: "The secret history of Pius XII". The author makes a little, in terms of new primary sources, go a very long way. There is scant evidence that he has worked extensively in the archives in either London or Washington. He ought to have made better use of the excellent Cambridge library.
His use of the new Vatican files are - without access to other related primary material in Rome - simply out of context. There is a radical solution which will ensure that authors must research widely before reaching the heights of righteousness: Open up the Vatican archives to the end of Pacelli's pontificate in order to allow historians the opportunity to compare the policies and pastoral actions of Pius XI and Pius XII.
But you might as well be talking to the wall. Yet we must always live in hope.
Dr Dermot Keogh is departmental head and professor of History, University College Cork. He is the author of Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland - Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust